In the last 3/4 years I’ve been following Mr.RIP a blogger turned streamer that talks about career related stuff (mostly for people with a Computer Science background) and personal finance. Thanks to him, a little over two years ago, I joined his Discord for a call with some other people that I had never met to talk about creating an app for tracking our net worth.
The idea was to start simple by first letting the user just track his income and expenses and then expand the app to help them track more assets like stock, bonds, commodities and so on. Also the cardinal point was that the app should be open source and free to use (at least until any cost comes up). Seems simple, right? Wrong.
In this post I’ll talk about all the great and not so great things that I learned during this journey. If you don’t want to spend the time to read it and you are just wondering if it was worth it then I can I answer you pretty briefly, 100% YES.
The start
I have to say that the call that I joined wasn’t the first one of the project. There were already some people involved that were working on deciding the language and framework to use and some screens were already there.
They landed on Flutter as the framework because they wanted the possibility to easily build on more than one platform possibly supporting both desktop and mobile with only one repo.
I don’t remember the exact details of that call, but two things stood out:
- Everyone there was really excited about the project and wanted to help as much as they can.
- There wasn’t any structure and what was done until that moment was by individual contributors that basically tried to implement each feature in the way they felt was more natural to them.
I was also really keen to help but there was a big issue, I never wrote a single line of Dart (the language used by Flutter) in my life.
During the call I discovered that there was someone that actually started working on designing the app UX and UI, this someone was Federico. He did a fantastic job on looking at what was currently in the market and was starting to create a figma with the screens just around that time. It was at this moment that it came to me that my job could be to help build some structure in the project by writing a Product Brief that could explain what each screen should do, in this way the developers would know a bit more what they were implementing and we could also discuss with Federico if something was either not clear or too difficult to implement at that time. That’s how without even knowing much about developing a mobile app I became the Project Manager of Sossoldi.
Your first clients are the developers
It took some work but after a few days the first version of the document was ready, it was ~15 pages of screenshots and bullet points, at the start I also added a table with different roles (project manager, maintainer, frontend and backend contributor) in which everyone could write their name. The idea was to start defining some roles and clarify who could overlook each section of the app.
Unfortunately, this approach wasn’t effective. It definitely helped a little bit in counting how many people were more or less involved but what I didn’t understand at the time was that this is not like working at all, you can’t expect people to do something just because they said that they might be interested. What you need is to “sell” them the idea of the project and make them really feel like they are doing something important. This was probably the most important lesson that I learned while contributing to this project, in open source if you are not going to do 90% or more of the work then the first clients are the other developers themselves.
It took me a while to understand this, and it’s probably why it took this much time to arrive at a beta, for long periods of time we expected that people would just come and build stuff because an issue on GitHub would say so but is much more complicated. You need to interact as much as possible, communicate what you are doing, try to understand if there are pain points that need to be resolved and most of all show that there is more to it and you have a plan for the future.
Writing some code
After some time spent in writing docs and talking about what the app should do and look like I felt like this couldn’t be enough, how can I be the person that tries to overview the project without actually contributing to it? I’m a software engineer I must be able to help with something even if I haven’t done much in mobile development yet.
Here is were I made the same mistake that I always do when I want to try something new, I went down the tutorial hell. I started watching and searching for the perfect Flutter course both free and paid. This was justified in my head because I also wanted to gather some resources for other people that maybe wanted to be part of the project but needed a place to start from.
After several days and a lot of hours on Youtube I realized that I didn’t really learn much and that if I wanted to actually learn how to use Flutter I should just pick an issue and try to tackle it.
After looking at all the opened ones I saw one that seemed interesting, it was about creating a widget for display line graphs in the app. I felt like it wouldn’t be to difficult, I just had to find a good library and then just make it work for our use case.
I struggled with it for an entire weekend but in the end with a lot of googling and some help from ChatGPT (I try not to over use it, but it can be a pretty good tool) I was able to get a good enough solution, so I open the PR and then I waited.
The review process went smoothly, and the PR was merged with minimal changes. That was one of the best moments since I joined the project, seeing your work be recognized and merged is a great feeling.
After that I also contributed to other sections of the app, mostly small changes but in the future I want to try and challenge myself with bigger parts and see if I can actually do it.
Achilles and the tortoise
After a few months the project was going great a lot of people came and went but there was pretty much always some activity.
The app looked great and we were adding bit by bit everything, to the point that I felt like a beta was just around the corner. I kept telling people that we were just a few months away but after sometime I realized that for every step forward, we fell two steps behind the finish line.
We even had a call with Mr. RIP in which we said that we were pretty much done and that we could start planning a live with him to present the project. That call was 9 months ago.
This wasn’t the fault of anyone specific but we had to find a way out of it. This is when after a few calls, we really defined what the Minimum Viable Product could be and decided to basically ignore everything else. The dark theme resets every time you restart the app? Who cares, we need to focus on the basics and have them good enough.
This is when things really turned around, and we were actually getting closer.
Getting there, finally
On December 4th, 2024 we finally made a silent release on GitHub. We shared it with the people inside the project to see if it was good enough. We started finding some bugs here and there but fortunately nothing major that should block the release, in the end this would be a beta and people shouldn’t be surprised to find bugs.
This is when we started the procedure to publish the app in both the App Store and Google Play store. Fortunately one of the maintainers, Luca, already had a developer account on both and offered to use them without going through the hustle of creating a new one ad hoc.
Finally after going through the review process on February 14th and more than 2 years since I joined the project, Sossoldi was available both for Android and iOS.
Closing thoughts and what’s ahead
This has been an incredible journey and the thing that thrills me the most is that this is just the beginning. I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of beautiful and really talented people.
I had to learn a lot and not only about Flutter or mobile development but also about communicating affectively, planning and in general easing people in doing their best.
In the next weeks there are some changes that will take place, first of all we are going to focus on releasing the first stable version of the app, in which we will fix most of the bugs found but also adding the possibility to backup your data into a csv file. If you are interested in this project I invite you to join it, try the app and let us know what you think.
If you read this entire blog post I really appreciate it, I’ll see you in the next one.
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